Brand Experience, Glass Houses, and Naked Shower Guy
By Mike Brown
Glass Houses
Other homeowners have gone a different route.
Directly across the street from the parking lot where I attend 6:30 a.m. mass on weekdays is a Cape Cod house whose window has been replaced with glass block.
Yes, glass block with no window covering.
Naked Shower Guy and Brand Experience Monitoring
Nonetheless, naked shower guy isn’t unlike a lot of organizations who think they have a solid handle on the brand experience of their customers, employees, and stakeholders. It’s easy for a company to delude itself into thinking it knows what its customers and employees are experiencing. That’s especially true when they hand out thousands of URLs and phone numbers to customers asking them to let the company know how they’re doing via a few questions on inbound customer surveys rating performance.
Here’s the potential problem, though, with relying solely on this type of brand experience monitoring.
Substitute naked shower guy in his Cape Cod house for one of these businesses handling brand experience monitoring through quick inbound customer surveys.
If naked shower guy were doing a five-question online survey, he might ask about a variety of standard elements of the brand experience around a Prairie Village Cape Cod house—is it well-painted and maintained? Is the yard mowed? Are the trees and flowers attractive? Is the surrounding area clean and free of trash?
He’d never ask, “How do you find the view of me naked in the shower every morning?”
Why?
Because he’d be deciding questions to ask based on his inside-out view of what the brand experience is. And clearly no one has mentioned to him that the most prominent experience related to his brand is him naked in the shower.
Outside-In Brand Experience Monitoring
So before you launch into a program to capture customer ratings on the standard stuff, take the time to ask questions and encourage all your audiences to throw some stones about what makes up your brand experience from their perspectives. Don’t just rely on your internal perspective of brand experience or you’ll miss some potential problem areas you’d never imagine.
Because you DON’T want to be naked shower guy. Trust me on that.
Mike Brown is the founder of the Brainzooming Group. He has been at the forefront of leading Fortune 500 culture change, contributing new approaches in research, developing simplified tools for innovation, strategy planning, and aligning sales, marketing, and communications strategies for maximum business results. Additionally, he’s won multiple awards for his strategic brand-building approach to customer experiences in NASCAR and conference event marketing efforts.